Chapter 12: Killswitch

"Ginny! Are you there?"

A male voice pricked at the edges of her consciousness.

"What the hell happened? Did it —"

"I was able to separate them. It was a close call." More voices. This time it was a soft female voice. She wished they would all go away.

"You're not getting away with this if you broke her mind. The Minister will shut you down."

"We can pull a lot of strings, Julien."

The coldness in the last voice made Ginny want to shiver, but she wasn't sure she could move.

Julien. I recognize that name.

Light flooded in as she instinctively opened her eyes.

"She's awake," the female voice spoke again. It sounded familiar, but so far away.

"Ginny, are you okay? Can you talk?"

Julien. That was Julien. She blinked her surroundings into focus — she was lying on a bed of damp grass. Above her, ominous clouds filled the sky, their charcoal curves grimacing down at her. A few meters away, the opening of the cave glinted like an icy maw, its entrance sending a wave of dread through her body. Her back was completely numb and her limbs felt as if they were made of lead.

Julien kneeled down, his stormy expression entering her field of vision. She felt an instant surge of relief at seeing his face, but the anger in his eyes implied something bad must have happened — something she couldn't quite remember.

"Say something, Ginny," Julien implored, his eyes tracing hers, never leaving her face. "When's your birthday?"

What a strange question.

"August eleventh," she croaked. She coughed and accepted Julien's hand helping her sit up. Relief flashed through Julien's face and it was only then that he looked away at the older man and… Healer Morrison.

The woman's voice she had heard had been her mind healer's.

"Welcome back, Ginny," Healer Morrison said with a thin smile. "You gave all of us quite the scare there."

"What happened?" Ginny barely noticed the flick of a warming charm from Julien as she eyed her surroundings, looking for any clues.

She gasped as she saw two bodies lying prone in the grass — Hermione! She could recognize that bushy hair anywhere. And right beside her, she squinted to identify… shite, it's Harry.

Why was no one attending to them? Why were they all gathered around her, unconcerned about the other two? Her mind pooled with suspicion.

Ginny pushed herself away from Julien and struggled onto her feet. Her wand was an arm's length away and she plucked it up quickly, backing away from all three others. She struggled to hold the wand steady as her dizziness almost forced her back down.

"Easy there, we don't mean any harm," the older man chuckled. He sounded pleased as he held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. He was bald with bottomless hazel-green eyes, a graying beard the only hair among the deep-set wrinkles on his face. Wait, I saw his face in Julien's memory. That's —

"Virto, you think she should listen to you?" Julien's voice whipped through the wind. She'd never heard him so angry before. "After every damn thing you've done?"

"What did you do to Hermione and Harry? Are they alive?" Ginny demanded, refusing to drop her wand.

"They're very much alive, just Stunned," Healer Morrison said softly, like she was talking to an injured animal. "We did it to protect them from having their memories wiped later."

"Maybe we should start at the beginning, now that she's awake," Virto said. "Lana?"

Healer Morrison nodded.

Right. They're married. And he's dead. What the fuck?

"Ginny, there are things I haven't been entirely honest with you about. I've been working for the Department of Mysteries for the last few years with Virto, and we've been studying the diary for a while now."

Ginny blinked, hard. It was hard to picture her polished, calm Healer living a secret life as an Unspeakable. However, before Ginny could fully digest the information, Virto spoke up.

"In our research, we discovered that the diary had an affinity for mind magic and necromancy," he explained. "We made the hypothesis that you could harness a large amount of magical power because of your connection to it."

Ginny wanted to laugh in his face. I could harness a large amount of magical power from the diary? Bollocks. All the diary did for me was almost kill me, again and again.

"So then what did you do?" Julien asked, glaring at the man, waves of tension emanating from his stance. Virto turned slowly, facing the pure wall of resentment on Julien's face without a flinch. The man's age-worn face seemed to be carved from stone, utterly unfeeling in the eye of Julien's rage. The air between them was charged with a mercurial energy, fire against ice.

Neither moved a muscle for an extended second, until Julien spoke again, his voice lowered into a growl. "What did you do, Virto? Tell her."

"You used to be afraid of me," Virto said to Julien, quietly enough so Ginny had to strain to hear him.

"Boys."

Healer Morrison interrupted the pissing contest with her voice and Virto shook his head, as if to shake off an unpleasant sensation.

"We infused the diary with the mind magic needed to create the Inferi puppets that you encountered. And then we released it."

"You… released it?" Ginny couldn't help but parrot the words back in disbelief.

"We released it," Virto continued, unruffled by Ginny's outburst. "As an experiment. To observe whether you could harness the power from the diary. We set up a bumbling Death Eater sympathizer — Ilya Dolohov — with all the tools needed to unlock the puppet creation of the diary. All the mind magic and necromancy we built into the diary to be resurfaced with a simple Prior Incantato."

"And Ilya took the bait. He was the perform opponent for you," Healer Morrison said. The smile on her face was genuine, like she had just witnessed a job well done.

What. The. Fuck.

"So you two set up The Dealer? You set up my episodes? You set me up to get attacked today?" Ginny asked when she finally found herself able to form words again.

"In a way, yes," said Healer Morrison.

Memories surged into Ginny's mind like waves thundering onto a shore. The jagged blue ceiling of the ice cave. The Dealer's crazed face. The double-pull of her wand.

Ginny gasped, her breath a whisper in the air. "The conduit! It led me to you two. Not Julien. Not Ilya."

"Yes," Virto confirmed, with a pleased tug of his lips. He swiveled to face his wife. "You were right, my dear. We shouldn't have doubted this one."

Healer Morrison murmured something back to her husband, but Ginny wasn't listening.

"You… you set up for me to get attacked. And for… for Ron to die." The accusations shot out of Ginny's mouth before she could even process them. All she knew was her hand was still on her wand, pointed at Virto. Her wrist was trembling — whether from shock or from rage she had no idea.

"We couldn't predict the side effects of our experiment. If we could have prevented Ron's casualty, we would have. But the stakes were too high to shut the diary prematurely," Virto said. He spoke calmly, and Ginny struggled to find any trace of regret in his voice.

"You set up an experiment where you played with real people's lives," Julien snapped, his dark eyes boring into Virto's. "And you… pretended to be dead the whole time to escape the constraints of the Department of Mysteries? You taught me better than that."

"I never said I left the Department of Mysteries. I left the Ministry. Dying was the perfect excuse to move into the underground branch of the Department," Virto replied, his eyes still locked with Julien's, no trace of humor between them.

From the flash of surprise that flitted across Julien's eyes, Ginny could tell Julien had no clue about the underground side of the Department.

"You couldn't have given me any warning? Or told me something?" Julien retorted, eyebrows raised. "I could have drawn up something more reasonable than this —"

"I apologize for not teaching you the full organizational politics," Virto interrupted calmly. "And for any shock I caused. Think of this as another test — "

"No. I put up with far too many of those before you went and died. This is another level of despicable," Julien grit out.

"Julien, Julien," Virto shook his head in a disappointed way. "You have strayed far from the purpose of the Department."

"You went too far. You always taught me to include a killswitch in every experiment. Where was your switch this time, in case Ilya became the next Dark Lord? Or have you lost all remaining regard for the people you play with?"

"Of course I had a killswitch. We're looking at her," Virto replied.

"He means Ginny," Healer Morrison clarified. Ginny jolted at her name. "Without her consciousness, the diary has no power."

Oh, of course. I'm a killswitch. Just a handy tool in their experiment. They would have murdered me without a second thought.

Her stomach felt frozen, a claw of despair churning up a nauseating mixture of fear and confusion. It wasn't fair. Who were these people and why the hell had she been forced into their insanity?

"So you would have killed me to stop Ilya. The Dealer that you made. Seems only fair," Ginny said, irony laced between every word.

"But we didn't, you see," Virto finally turned his gaze away from Julien, facing Ginny now with a wry smile. "We thought it was an appropriate risk to take, a price you might be happy to pay."

"Happy?" Ginny couldn't stop her voice from rising into a shriek. "Why the hell would I be happy about this?"

"Because of what you are now," Healer Morrison said. Her smooth, calm voice was a stark contrast to Ginny's, and in it lied a chilliness that seemed to settle in the air like a thick blanket of fog. To think she had trusted the Healer — Ginny shook her head, unable to bear the depth of the deceit. Healer Morrison continued her explanation, oblivious to the storm inside Ginny's head.

"The diary needed you to defeat its previous master, just like a wand. We gave you Julien, to train you. We gave you an opponent — Ilya — and you defeated him. Now you should have complete control over the diary. Try performing Legilimency on it again."

Ginny looked toward where she had pointed, her gaze settling on the battered cover of the diary propped up on a small rock.

The instant her eyes locked on it, she felt a wave of longing wash over her like a gentle breeze, lifting her up and carrying her closer to it. The diary was calling out to her again, much louder than before, its ethereal tune piercing the air. She wanted to resist the temptation to interact with it, if just for the sake of spiting the Healer —

But she couldn't. The song called out to her as if caressing her very will itself, its hypnotic melody seeping into her soul like a balm, beckoning her closer.

"Legilimens," she murmured. She hadn't even bothered to redirect her wand at the book, but she knew it had worked as soon as the last syllable left her lips. Her consciousness floated into the book effortlessly and she felt a euphoric buoyancy it awaited her commands.

An expectant hum surrounded her— a song at dog-whistle frequency, but muffled. It felt like the first time she had ever held a wand. The promise of power. She could wield this diary and it would listen to her.

Then something was shaking her out of her reverie.

Ginny opened her eyes, not having realized she'd closed them. Julien stood in front of her shaking her, just barely holding her limp form up by her shoulders.

"You just did it again. Risking her mind for your entertainment," Julien snapped at Virto. He didn't drop his tight clutch on her, even when she was able to stand on her own again.

Stay here. Ginny unconsciously leaned into his hold and he pulled her closer to his chest, fingers digging in almost painfully on her shoulders.

"Lana would have pulled her out if needed," Virto replied, unmoved. He considered Julien and Ginny's positioning with curiosity, eyes roaming between them. "Well, what did you feel with the diary, Ginny? You're the one to prove our hypothesis right or wrong."

Ginny didn't say anything, staring at the ground in front of the man. There was no way she'd give him the satisfaction that his hypothesis was right. The power she had felt had been unlike anything she'd ever experienced. She was brimming with energy, wanting, needing to dive back into the diary and explore what she could make it do.

But all of this — all the loss, the grief, the stress, the nightmares, the frustration of her past year — she had never asked for any of it.

One glance at Virto and she realized she didn't have to say a word for him to extract the truth. She felt a foreign presence in her head shoving past her exhausted mental shields. Virto retreated just as quickly as he'd entered and nodded to his wife, a satisfied smile on his face. Something unspoken passed between them, and Healer Morrison beamed.

"Fantastic. We have a job offer for you, Ginny."